A beloved, bestselling classic of humorous and nostalgic Americanathe book that inspired the equally classic Yuletide film.

The holiday film A Christmas Story, first released in 1983, has become a bona fide Christmas perennial, gaining in stature and fame with each succeeding year. Its affectionate, wacky, and wryly realistic portrayal of an American familys typical Christmas joys and travails in small-town Depression-era Indiana has entered our imagination and our hearts with a force equal to Its a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street.

This edition of A Christmas Story gathers together in one hilarious volume the gems of autobiographical humor that Jean Shepherd drew upon to create this enduring film. Here is young Ralphie Parkers shocking discovery that his decoder ring is really a device to promote Ovaltine; his mother and fathers pitched battle over the fate of a lascivious leg lamp; the unleashed and unnerving savagery of Ralphies duel in the show with the odious bullies Scut Farkas and Grover Dill; and, most crucially, Ralphies unstoppable campaign to get Santaor anyone elseto give him a Red Ryder carbine action 200-shot range model air rifle. Who cares that the whole adult world is telling him, Youll shoot your eye out, kid?

The pieces that comprise A Christmas Story, previously published in the larger collections In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash and Wanda Hickeys Night of Golden Memories, coalesce in a magical fashion to become an irresistible piece of Americana, quite the equal of the film in its ability to warm the heart and tickle the funny bone.

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Jean Shepherd was one of Americas favorite humorists, his most notable achievement being the creation of the indefatigable Ralphie Parker and his quest for a BB gun in the holiday classic A Christmas Story. But he was so much more, a comic Garrison Keillorlike figure whose unique voice transcended the airwaves and affected a whole generation of nostalgic Americans. The Ferrari in the Bedroom is Shepherds wry, affectionate look at the hang-ups and delusions of Americans in the 1970s. From his sardonic assessment of fads such as the nostalgia craze (Thinking that the old days were good is a terrible sickness. Everything was just as bad then as it is now.) to a modest proposal for the foundation of S.P.L.A.T. (The Society for the Prevention of the Leaving of Animal Turds), Jean Shepherd provides a generous measure of his special brand of wise and warm humor as an antidote for some of Americas more ridiculous obsessions.

From the wild and wacky world of a favorite funnyman, a dozen truer-than-life tales of tailgating on the Jersey Tumpike, infuriating infants, and other everyday catastrophes, defeats, and humiliations that are the familiar fate of Americans everywhere.

A beloved, bestselling classic of humorous and nostalgic Americana, reissued in a strikingly designed paperback edition.

Before Garrison Keillor and Spalding Gray there was Jean Shepherd: a master monologist and writer who spun the materials of his all-American childhood into immensely resonant--and utterly hilarious--works of comic art. In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash represents one of the peaks of his achievement, a compound of irony, affection, and perfect detail that speaks across generations.

In God We Trust, Shepherd's wildly witty reunion with his Indiana hometown, disproves the adage "You can never go back." Bending the ear of Flick, his childhood-buddy-turned-bartender, Shepherd recalls passionately his genuine Red Ryder BB gun, confesses adolescent failure in the arms of Junie Jo Prewitt, and relives a story of man against fish that not even Hemingway could rival. From pop art to the World's Fair, Shepherd's subjects speak with a universal irony and are deeply and unabashedly grounded in American Midwestern life, together rendering a wonderfully nostalgic impression of a more innocent era when life was good, fun was clean, and station wagons roamed the earth.

A comic genius who bridged the gap between James Thurber and David Sedaris, Shepherd may have accomplished for Holden, Indiana, what Mark Twain did for Hannibal, Missouri.

Disclaimer: No U.S. Military Personnel were harmed during the making of these fictional reminiscences. No warrior is more forgotten than he who has been left behind by the war department. Most men who have never tasted combat beyond the occasional fistfight on poker night quickly learn to lay low and zip the lip when battlefield stories are unfurled by the Purple Hearters at the dinner table. Except, of course, for our man Jean Shepherd. Fearless in his uncombativeness, he manfully fought his dearth of frontline duty with the weapons he wielded unmatched by even the most decorated dogface: rapid-fire griping and explosive laughter. Jean Shepherd was, and remains, a pervasive part of American culture. His quirky individuality was portrayed for posterity by Jason Robards in the play and film, A Thousand Clowns , written by Shep's close pal, Herb Gardner. Jack Nicholson embodied a Shepherd-like late-night radio talker in The King of Marvin Gardens . While in Network , by Paddy Chayefsky (another of Shep's comic cohorts), the television newscaster beseeches his listeners to open their windows and yell, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore," an unmistakable echo of Shepherd's radio habit of "hurling an invective" like a hand grenade out into the nation's air waves. Tens of thousands of rabid fans stayed up past their bedtime with transistor radios stashed under their pillows to follow Shep's always unpredictable, usually extemporaneous, verbal forays into current events, social mores, idle thoughts, stories about his childhood in northern Indiana ("I was this kid, see..."), his army days, and his idiosyncratic take on his world-wide travels. Shepherd once bamboozled an innocent public, and gullible publishing world, by promoting a non-existent book ( I, Libertine ) and author (Frederick R. Ewing), then co-writing it with sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon. It sold in best-seller numbers. Shepherd wrote nearly two dozen stories for Playboy and even interviewed the Beatles for the magazine. He published several best-selling books of his stories and articles; he appeared at Carnegie Hall, Town Hall, and in hundreds of jam-packed college auditoriums. Shep's Army is the first volume of new Shepherd tales to be published in a quarter century.

For that small but populous slice of the world reachable by radio station WOR (New York City and environs), Jean Shepherd was once a nightly fixture, back in the days when radio talk didn't shock. On the air, he would tell tales of his Indiana boyhood, which he eventually refined enough to write down. Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories collects the stories that first appeared in magazines in the 1960s and '70s. For that slightly larger slice of the world that has seen the hysterical 1983 movie A Christmas Story, the book's characters and setting will be instantly recognizable: the film was cobbled together from Shepherd's stories. (One thing you have to say for the man, not only was he funny, but boy, could he recycle.)

Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories guides you through every triumph and crisis of Shepherd's boyhood. One of the most entertaining involved the hijacking of the family's precious Easter ham:

BLAM! The kitchen door flew open. It had been left ajar just a crack to let the air come in to cool the ham. I rushed to the kitchen just in time to see 4,293 blue-ticked Bumpus hounds roar through the screen door in a great, roiling mob. The leader of the pack--the one that almost got my old man every day--leaped high onto the table and grabbed the butt end of the ham in his enormous jaws. They were in and out in less than five seconds. "HOLY CHRIST!" The old man leaped out of his chair. "THE HAM! THE HAM! THOSE GODDAMN DOGS! THE HAM!!"

They say comedy is tragedy plus time; that's why growing up is so funny. Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories--like its author--never disappoints.

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